Talks with Kremlin-linked lawyer in June 2016 appear to be the earliest known private meeting between key aides to US president and a Russian

Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer shortly after Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, it has emerged, in what appears to be the earliest known private meeting between key aides to the president and a Russian.

Representatives of Donald Trumps eldest son and son-in-law confirmed the June 2016 meeting after the New York Times reported on Saturday on the gathering of the men and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower. Then-chairman of the campaign Manafort also attended, according to the statement from Donald Trump Jr.

Everybody knows Russia meddled in US elections, says HaleyBusiness Standard
After Russian President Vladimir Putin denied interfering in the 2016 U.S. election, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said that the former made the statement just to “save his face.” “This is Russia trying to save face, and they can’t…

Some members of the Resistance have convinced themselves that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a magic red button he can press to eject Donald Trump from office any time he wants. Unfortunately, nothing works that way. Only the Republican Congress (impeachment) and the VP (25th Amendment) have those red buttons, and they’re not willing to use them yet. That leaves Mueller to employ more conventional means. But there is a strong signal from his camp that he’s further along than some pessimists might think.

With all the major hiring that he’s been doing right out of the gate, one might expect Robert Mueller to be hiring investigators, but he’s not. Sure, he already has access to the investigative resources of the FBI and other agencies. But he has a theoretically unlimited budget. If he felt he needed to accelerate the investigative phase by hiring outsiders, he could do it. Instead, he’s hiring prosecutors.

There would be no motivation for prosecutors to come on board yet unless the probe is far enough along for them to be relevant to it. And yet Mueller has hired a boatload of some of the most respected and sought-after prosecutors in the country. That means the investigative phase is quite far along, and they have the evidence they need.

Still no magic red button. Mueller’s job is not to prosecute Donald Trump. So his only reason to hire all these prosecutors is so they can prosecute Trump’s underlings and associates for their crimes in relation to Trump’s scandal. On paper this is because any guilty participants need to be punished. But in reality, you prosecute guilty underlings so they’ll flip on the boss. By the time Mueller’s team is done with all this prosecuting, enough underlings will be pointing the finger at Donald Trump that he’ll no longer be tenable in office. If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report.

Putin says he thinks Trump agreed with his election-hacking denialAsheboro Courier Tribune
The U.S. agencies concluded that Russian hackers stole and released emails of officials in the Democratic National Committee with the intent to damage Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and help Trump. Since the election, there have been other …

The Readers’ Forum: Sunday lettersWinston-Salem Journal
How ironic to begin one’s celebration of Independence Day with the July 4 article Disbarred injury attorney convicted of embezzlement, about a regional lawyer whose dependence on crack cocaine fueled his embezzlement of more than $100,000 from his …

Trump’s nationalists triumphant after Europe tripPolitico
At the G-20 summit in Germany, Trump stuck to his dissent from a global climate change consensus, befriended RussianPresident Vladimir Putin and weighed potential new steel tariffs that a top European Union official angrily branded protectionist…

Everything President Trump has tweeted (and what it was about)Los Angeles Times
His tweets have the power to shape international relations, send stock prices up or down and galvanize the American public. We’re watching …. Amid speculation that Putin, a former KGB agent, might manage to maneuver Trump into making some …

Up to now, the confirmed meetings between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia have all been highly suspicious but have all had ways in which they could be explained away. Jeff Sessions claimed he only met with the Russian Ambassador because he was doing so in his role as a Senator, for instance. But now comes confirmation of a meeting that could not have been anything but collusion between the Trump team and the Russian government.

Key members of Donald Trump’s family and campaign staff held a meeting with a top Kremlin lawyer during the campaign, then lied about it, according to an explosive new report from the New York Times (link) and incredibly, Donald Trump Jr is now admitting to the meeting but is insisting that it was about the adoption of Russian kids.

So we’re supposed to believe that everyone from Donald Trump Jr to Jared Kushner to Paul Manafort had such a strong moral compunction about Russian adoption that they stopped what they were doing in the middle of the campaign to hold a meeting with a Kremlin lawyer, just to get the adoption issue cleared up. This might actually be the weakest on-the-fly excuse that a stupid criminal has ever come up with to try to explain away criminal activities after getting caught in the act.

To be clear, we still don’t know what was discussed in the meeting. If there are tapes of the meeting, as Donald Trump seems to keep unwittingly hinting at during his recent Twitter rants, then the NY Times doesn’t appear to have those tapes. But considering that the upper ranks of the Trump campaign all piled into a meeting with a notorious Kremlin attorney like Natalia Veselnitskaya during the campaign, this is nothing short of a collusion bombshell. Moreover, there are likely larger collusion bombshells forthcoming. If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report.

If you’re an American, today just plain sucked. The United States hasn’t been humiliated like this on the world stage in as long as anyone can remember. Donald Trump, the most embarrassing and illegitimate “president” in our nation’s history, met with Vladimir Putin and fully submitted to him, thus confirming that he’s indeed a Russian puppet. But if you want Trump’s demise to happen, today was a necessary and major step.

Donald Trump’s base probably loved it today when Trump kissed Putin’s proverbial ring today, because all his base seems to care about is harming America from within in order to punish the rest of us. But Trump’s base is no more than perhaps 15% of the country. No president has ever survived on 15%, so it doesn’t matter what his base thinks. Since Trump took office we’ve watched his approval rating slide from the low forties to the high-to-mid thirties. That may not seem like much but it’s actually everything.

Trump’s roughly 35% approval rating is 15% base, and 20% tentative support from not-all-that-political people who were never fully sold on him. We’ve that second group slowly but surely slip away from Trump as his time in office has gone on and gotten uglier. I’ve said from the start that if he drops below 30%, even the Republicans in Congress will have to find a way to jettison him in order to maintain some chance of getting reelected. They care far more about saving their own jobs than they do about Trump.

And while things like gerrymandering and voter suppression are forms of cheating, they only buy a point or two at most. So yes, the Democrats can very much win the midterms no matter how much the Republicans cheat. If Donald Trump keeps embarrassing himself on the national stage, as he did today in such plainly obvious fashion that even the people in the middle who don’t watch cable news will hear about it, he’ll become so toxic that large chunks of congressional Republican will come out against him. And that’ll be the end of him. For better or worse, the things Trump does that hurt America’s stature are also the things that march him that much closer to his demise. If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report

I just happened to walk past the World Trade Center memorial today, which took me back to the feelings I had on 9/11. On that day we didn’t know who was attacking us, or why, or how bad it was, or even when it would end. The world was changing by the minute that day, in ways we could never have imagined, and couldn’t comprehend. It was the Twilight Zone. And then I went home today and tuned in for Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin, and realized we’re right back in it.

I lack the breadth of scope to properly compare the 9/11 attack on America to the Trump-Russia attack on America. It’s not even a comparison that can be fully fleshed out yet because, by definition, we don’t yet fully know what this Trump-Russia attack is, or how bad it is, or when or how it’ll end. All I know is that the Twilight Zone haze I felt on that day sixteen years ago was a feeling that gradually dissipated the next day and beyond as we regained a bit of control and understanding of the situation. But without consciously realizing it, I’ve been increasingly having that same Twilight Zone feeling every day since last year.

The thing about 9/11 is that we didn’t feel it coming. Sure, everyone (except George W. Bush) knew that Bin Laden was looking to hit us in a big way and go out with a bang. But he’d hit us before, and it was nothing like that. So we went from zero to chaos within minutes that morning. But this Trump thing has been different altogether.

All along we’ve been the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, lacking the impetus to jump out because the temperature was rising so gradually. This mentally deranged Russian traitor game show host Donald Trump invaded us one step at a time. First he destroyed a political party. Then he destroyed the integrity of the election process. Now he’s destroying the Executive Branch. And he’s trying to destroy the United States as sovereign nation.

I still think the rule of law will prevail, because people like Trump never succeed in the end. You won’t find a single Trump-like figure in history who didn’t come to a very bad end. But in the mean time, as we try to figure out how to work our way through this daily national crisis, I’m left to consider that the Twilight Zone feeling of 9/11 has once again crept up on us all.

Europe loves America, but not TrumpLos Angeles Times
In other words: Do not be like Donald Trump. L.A. Times. Is Trump mentally fit to serve? Three weeks ago on The Times’ op-ed page, Dr. Prudence L. Gourguechon a physician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst evaluated the president’s leadership style …

AP FACT CHECK: The curious case of Trump, Putin encountersSFGate
This much is known: Trump and Putin were only “60 Minutes” ”stablemates” because they were on the same program. Trump’s segment was taped in New York; Putin’s in Russia. ___. TRUMP: “No matter where you look, the economy is blazing. And on every …

Trump, Putin discuss working together on cyber issuesThe Hill
U.S. and Russian officials indicated Friday that the two countries would work together in a number of areas, including cybersecurity. The officials revealed the effort following the first high-stakes meeting between President Trump and Russian …

Rob Reiner: ‘Russia Has Invaded US’Breitbart News
Filmmaker and actor Rob Reiner took to Twitter Friday to proclaim that Russia has invaded the United States, shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit in Hamburg. Russia has invaded US …

Video reveals widespread rebellion against EU, Muslim invasionWND.com
The world watched as Donald Trump had a face-to-face meeting with a portrait of Jan Sobieski, whose faith and achievements are now being recalled far and wide. Sobieski united European armies to resist the same enemy the EU refuses to call an enemy.

Late-night hosts discussed the president’s feud with George Conway and reviewed the long list of 2020 candidatesLate-night hosts took aim at the president’s Twitter feud with Kellyanne Conway’s husband and summarised the state of the 2020 race.Tweet Fighter: Kellyanne’s Husband vs. Kellyanne’s Boss pic.twitter.com/dYyDxfQy4Z Related: Trevor Noah on Boeing: ‘How was a self-crashing plane allowed […]